Climate Tracker is the blog of the International Center for Climate Governance aimed at reporting and analysing the evolution of negotiations, international and national climate policies

Monday, July 12, 2010

A new leader for the UNFCCC

As announced last May by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC in the next years will be a woman coming from a developing country. In fact, last Thursday July 8, Ms. Christiana Figueres has taken the lead in the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. With a long experience as a member of the Costa Rican negotiating team and in both non-governmental and private sectors, Ms. Figueres is considered one of the most skilled mediators of the Convention as well as an international leader on strategies to address global climate challenges. For this reason she already facilitated and co-chaired several contact groups, in particular the Contact Group on Clean Development Mechanism in Nairobi in 2006, in Poznan in 2008, and in Copenhagen in 2009, and the Contact Group on flexibility mechanisms for the post 2012 regime, in Bonn, Accra and Poznan in 2008. In addition, she was a member of the Friends of the Chair that negotiated the Bali Action Plan in December 2007.In replacing Yvo de Boer to the head of the Convention, Christiana Figueres becomes the fourth UNFCCC Executive Secretary and inherits the difficult task of leading climate Talks for the future agreement in Cancun and beyond.

In the picture Ms. Figueres with two of her predecessors, Mr. Yvo de Boer (left) whom she succeeds, and Mr. Michael Zammit Cutajar (right), the first UNFCCC Executive Secretary in office from 1991 to 2002. Ms. Joke Waller-Hunter, who was in office from 2002, passed away in 2005.